By Hieromonk Damascene
The Consequences of Christ’s Redemptive Work, Part III
The aim of the Christian life, says St. Seraphim of Sarov, is to acquire the Grace of the Holy Spirit. [31] We receive the seed of that Grace within us at Baptism. And then, through our sacramental life in the Church, through a life of prayer and virtue, practicing the commandments of Christ, we are to cultivate and nurture this seed of inward baptismal Grace so as to acquire a greater measure of Grace. In being ever more filled with God’s Grace or Energy, we grow ever more in the likeness of Christ. Then, after our death, Christ will recognize us as His own and will receive us into His Kingdom.
At the beginning of this talk I mentioned that Christians are given the potential of attaining to a state even higher than Adam’s state before the Fall. Through Christ’s incarnation, death and Resurrection, man can not only be restored to what Adam lost; now he can attain to what Adam was meant to attain. Man can be filled with God’s Energy to such an extent as to be deified by Grace. Vladimir Lossky writes that “In breaking the tyranny of sin [through His work of redemption], our Savior opens to us anew the way of deification, which is the final end of man.” [32]
St. Symeon the New Theologian, who experienced the Grace of deification, speaks of this as participation in the life of God Himself. “He Himself is discovered within me,” writes St. Symeon, “resplendent inside my wretched heart, enlightening me from all sides with His immortal splendor, shining on all of my members with His rays. Entirely intertwined with me, He embraces me entirely. He gives Himself totally to me, the unworthy one, and I am filled with His love and beauty. I am sated with pleasure and Divine tenderness. I share in the Light. I participate also in the glory. My face shines like that of my Beloved and all my members become bearers of the Light.” [33]
What St. Symeon describes, as marvelous as it is, is only a foretaste of the future life in heaven that is promised to Christ’s true followers. It is only the beginning of a progress that will never end. “Indeed,” says St. Symeon, “over the ages the progress will be endless, for a cessation of this growing toward the end without ending would be nothing but a grasping at the ungraspable. The One on Whom no one can be sated would then become an object of satiety. By contrast, to be filled with Him and to be glorified in His Light will cause unfathomable progress.” [34]
Furthermore, the glory that now exists among the saints and angels in heaven is only a foretaste of the glory that will be revealed at the General Resurrection, when all the saving fruits of Christ’s incarnation, death and Resurrection are to be fully revealed. Adam, it will be remembered, was supposed to raise the first-created world closer to God, to make it more spiritual through his own spiritual ascent to God. Adam failed in his purpose, so the New Adam, our Lord Jesus Christ, came to fulfill it. His redemptive work was already accomplished with His death and Resurrection. But the fruits of that work unfold over time. As Christians we have already tasted some of those fruits, but we are to know them in their fullness after the General Resurrection. For through Christ’s Resurrection, not only will man be resurrected in a renewed, spiritual body: the entire creation will be renewed and become spiritual. As the book of the Apocalypse says, there will be a New Heaven and a New Earth (cf. Apoc. 21:1).
~ A talk delivered at the Annual Lenten Clergy Confession of the New Gracanica Metropolitanate and the Western American Diocese of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Jackson, California, March 4/17, 2004. The Orthodox Word (No. 235, March-April, 2004), pp. 57-77. Posted with the blessing of Hieromonk Damascene; Orthodox Information Center, http://orthodoxinfo.com/inquirers/christcross.aspx.
Endnotes
31. Cf. Fr. Seraphim Rose, Genesis, Creation and Early Man (Platina, Calif.: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2000), pp. 156-57, 443-45.
32. Cf. St. John Damascene, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, in The Fathers of the Church, vol. 37 (1958), pp. 232-35; Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church(Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997), p. 118; and Fr. Seraphim Rose, Genesis, Creation and Early Man, pp. 171, 436-40.
33. Cf. St. John Damascene, Exact Exposition, p. 235; and Lossky, Mystical Theology, p. 126.
34. Cf. Fr. Seraphim Rose, Genesis, Creation and Early Man, pp. 157, 208-12, 351, 413-14, 421, 591-92.
